Huge Cleanup at Bomb-Making Megasite Is The New Atomic Fallout
Tri-City Herald reporter Annette Cary, who covers the U.S. Energy Dept.’s Hanford nuclear waste cleanup site for the Washington state newspaper, says employees there chafe at how high profile their work has become. For more than 60 years, their predecessors on the remote 586-sq-mile site toiled in total secrecy on a previous mission�to build America’s first generation of atomic weapons.
The legacy of Hanford’s massive industrial production has only recently become clear, as a new generation of scientists, engineers, technicians and construction workers confronts its by�product: the $2-billion-a-year remediation of some of the nastiest chemical and radiological hazards above and below ground.